Environmental Justice Storytelling: Angels and Isotopes at Yucca Mountain, Nevada

Environmental Justice Storytelling:Angels and Isotopes at Yucca

Mountain, Nevada

Donna HoustonDepartment of Environment and Geography, Macquarie University, NSW, Australia;

[email protected]

Abstract: This paper discusses the productive role of storytelling in communitystruggles for environmental justice. The individual and collective task of environmentaljustice storytelling highlights where the politics of pollution intersect with geographicalimaginations. Storytelling takes on a productive role in transforming localized andindividual emotions and experiences of environmental injustice into public knowledge thatis performed in the world. This paper draws on a case study of nuclear waste disposal atYucca Mountain in Nevada. I focus on how storytelling enacts scenarios of environmentalwitnessing and transformation that hold together a plurality of presences, absences, actionand imagination, past histories and hope for the future.

Keywords: environmental justice, activism, storytelling, contaminated landscapes,nuclear waste, imaginative spaces

To imbue a landscape with moral and even redemptive significance is for most of usnothing more than a romantic fantasy. But there are occasions when to travel through alandscape is to become empowered by raising its meaning (Michael Taussig 1987:335)

Redemption depends on the tiniest fissure in the continuous catastrophe (WalterBenjamin 2003:185).

IntroductionOn 9 March 2010, over a hundred antinuclear waste campaigners, politicians andactivists gathered to celebrate the demise of the Yucca Mountain Project (YMP)—the site for the first US commercial radioactive waste dump in Nevada. The mockwake for Yucca Mountain was held in Las Vegas at ghostbar, high above a vista ofcity lights. Yucca Mountain is located approximately 100 miles to the northwest,inside the Nevada National Security Site (Nevada Test Site) where, during the 1950s,flashes from the atmospheric testing program frequently lit up the Las Vegas sky.Yucca Mountain is a ridge of dense volcanic tuff that extends for seven miles alongthe southern part of the Nevada National Security Site on land closed to the publicand controlled by the US federal government. In 1987, the US government amendedthe Nuclear Waste Policy Act (1982), which explored the possibility of geologicdisposal in several states. The amended policy (popularly known as the “ScrewNevada Bill”) selected Yucca Mountain as the only site for consideration for theexcavation of radioactive waste.1 The federal plan set out a process to conducta “characterization study” of Yucca Mountain to ascertain its suitability for the

Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0 2012 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 1–19 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01006.xC© 2012 The Author. Antipode C© 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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burial of 77,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste. As a consequence, since itsenactment into law, the YMP has been fraught with contested science and politics(Shrader-Frechette 1993).

Yucca Mountain is an extinct volcano situated in an earthquake and flood pronedesert (Ewing and McFarlane 2002). It is also situated on Western Shoshone landthat is subject to an ongoing legal claim. The Western Shoshone contend thatYucca Mountain is sentient, “a snake that’s going north”, and is part of a living anddynamic landscape (Harney, interview, 29 November 2004). The Western Shoshonealso argue that in refusing to acknowledge Aboriginal title and American Indianobjections to high-level radioactive waste disposal, that the US government is inviolation of its own laws (Harney, interview, 29 November 2004). In early 2010, justdays before the wake at ghostbar, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announcedits decision to put an end to the YMP despite having spent over 20 years and anexcess of US$10.5 billion of taxpayer’s money attempting to licence and constructthe facility. This was a key election promise made to the State of Nevada by PresidentObama, one that was backed by the Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who hasbeen a long-time opponent of the dumping of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain(Stover 2011).

At the 9 March ghostbar gathering, citizens, politicians and activists celebratedtheir victory over Yucca Mountain and told stories about the long campaign againstradioactive waste disposal in Nevada. They brought along memory objects thatrepresented their sustained efforts over the years—signs, photographs, placardsand publications. Citizen Alert, one of the oldest citizen action groups and mostvigorous opponents of the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, markedthe occasion with the announcement that after 30 years of social organizing inNevada, it was closing its doors. Rebecca Solnit in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories,Wild Possibilities imagines that an “Angel of Alternate History” presides over suchevents, to stand as a witness to what is lost and what is gained in struggles forenvironmental justice (2004:73–76). The “Angel of Alternate History” is inspiredby Walter Benjamin’s (1968) “angel of history”, a figure described by Benjamin inhis famous essay “Thesis on the philosophy of history” as presiding over crises andcatastrophe that unfold in the present. In an oft-quoted sentence he wrote: “wherewe perceive a chain of events, [the angel] sees one single catastrophe which keepspiling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (1968:257). ForBenjamin, crisis is continuous because it is propelled by the powerful, linear storyof modern progress. The political narration of modern progress is destructive. Itdiscards events and stories that it does not recognize as its own concern. Benjaminasks: what gets left behind in the relentless, progressive narration of linear time?How can we contemplate the ruins at the angel’s feet and recover their meaning?

There are two key insights from Benjamin and Solnit that I pursue in this essay:(1) the disruption of the continuity between past and present reveals a pluralityof stories that shape alternative practices; and (2) these alternatives are ofteninvisible, fragmented and no longer available to us as direct experience but aresustained through storytelling and imagination. Throughout this paper I explorethese insights in relation to environmental justice storytelling at Yucca Mountain. Iargue that storytelling plays an important role in struggles for environmental justice

C© 2012 The Author. Antipode C© 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Environmental Justice Storytelling 3

as a type of work-in-the-world through which harmful environmental impacts can beremembered, witnessed and transformed. Environmental justice activists are calledto witness environmental degradation and its effects on their livelihoods, placesand bodies (Di Chiro 2008; Rose 2004). The tasks of witnessing, storytelling andmemory work create a space through which the “unimaginable” of environmentalpollution and unequal environmental protection can be expressed. Environmentaljustice storytelling provides a framework for understanding how multiple realities ofenvironmental injury come together in ways that are not always readily discerniblethrough policy or scientific practice.

In the first part of this paper, I focus on the role of imagination and storytellingfor understanding the unfolding realities of environmental injustice. In the secondpart, I consider environmental justice storytelling in further detail. I argue thatstorytelling does not just seek to represent things that have happened, but enactsdifferent ways of telling that can connect biographical, political, philosophical andplace-based meanings of environmental injustice in surprising ways. Rebecca Solnit’s“Angel of Alternate History” is an excellent metaphor for capturing the messinessand complexity of this. Unlike Benjamin’s angel that stands as a silent witness tocrisis and destruction, the “Angel of Alternate History” reminds us that we arealways standing at the threshold of a future that, because of our actions, maynever materialize (2004:73–76). Solnit’s angel asks us to believe in the invisibleand the unimaginable because it is here that alternate knowledge is sustained andwhere different futures might be enacted. In the last part of this paper, I draw on acase study of environmental justice storytelling at Yucca Mountain to explore howstories shape the controversy of high-level nuclear waste disposal in two different(but interrelated) public forums: Western Shoshone land justice and toxic touringas mobile memory work.

Imagining Environmental InjusticeA recent themed issue of Antipode on the “Spaces of environmental justice” exploresan enlarged context in which geographies of environmental justice take place andhow we might conceive of a broader set of theoretical engagements to understandthem (Antipode 2009). Holifield, Porter and Walker (2009:601–602) in theirintroduction to this issue highlight opportunities for “imaginative, methodologicallydiverse and theoretically pluralized” environmental justice research. The articles donot, however, substantively engage with storytelling and creative praxis in relationto environmental justice. Sze et al’s (2009) analyses of scale, politics, water andenvironmental justice in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta perhaps come closestto this theme. Their discussion of the complexity of environmental justice in fluidand multi-scaled systems such as water catchments show how divergent storiesabout water and place produce power and cultural difference. Sze et al’s articleanticipates the idea that stories too are sites of contestation over the meaning ofplaces, resources and land use. I explore a similar set of ideas by arguing that fiction,film, biography, photography and activism are also “spaces” in which environmentaljustice struggles play out and become public knowledge.


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The imaginative spaces of environmental justice are where the historically andspatially uneven politics of pollution intersect with personal and geographicalimaginations. Environmental injustice occurs in places that have been burdenedby the accumulation of pollutants, wastes and undesirable land use. LauraPulido (2000) argues that environmental injustice occurs as the result of aconfluence of historical, social and political factors (for example, the interconnectionbetween the processes of racialization and uneven urban development). Thisconfluence of social, ecological and economic inequity is accumulative and hasflow on effects that create the conditions for the “sedimentation” of injustice inparticular places (Pulido 2000:16). Environmental injustice gives rise to culturalimaginations that associate environmental degradation, contamination, waste andtoxicity with invisibility and marginalization (Kuletz 1998). In western popularculture, such places are viewed as the opposite of “wilderness” (pure andundefiled nature) and as a consequence, polluted and contaminated landscapeshave not typically been associated with mainstream ecological imaginations thatevoke senses, consideration, attachment or care. Rather, places that are markedby environmental injustice are often referred to as “sacrifice zones”—placesthat bear an unequal environmental burden for the greater “public good” ofeconomic and national development (Churchill and LaDuke 1992; Davis 2002;Kuletz 1998).

Valerie Kuletz (1998:7) argues that “sacrifice zones” carry a double burden. Notonly do they suffer accumulative environmental impacts that can cause cancer,asthma, reproductive problems and harm to other species; they are also often largelyinvisible in wider public imaginations. The environmental philosopher Val Plumwood(2008) called these “shadow places”—places that despite their importance to thefunctioning of social, economic and environmental systems “elude our knowledgeand responsibility”. “Sacrifice zones” are made through the material transformationof places and through the public narration of them as already polluted and ruined.The associations of environmentally degraded places with shadows, invisibility andan absence of public responsibility create conditions for further environmental injury.Sacrifice zones are vulnerable to cultural imaginations of contamination preciselybecause their status as already degraded makes them desirable sites for continuedhazardous land use.

Since the first community mobilizations against a toxic landfill in Warren Country,North Carolina in the early 1980s, various movements for environmental justicein the United States have struggled with the realities of living in sacrificedand shadow places. Many stories about these realities were told publically forthe first time in 1991 at the landmark National People of Color EnvironmentalLeadership Summit in Washington DC that brought together 300 African, Latino,Native and Asian Americans from all 50 states. The testimony of communities ofcolour suffering from poisoning from local industrial land use; from the impactsof uranium mining and nuclear weapons testing; and from living in housingconstructed on chemical landfill sites constituted a moment that reshaped thestory of contemporary environmental politics (Alston 2010:14–15). Dana Alstonwrites:



For people of color, environmental issues are not just a matter of preserving ancientforests or defending whales. While the importance of saving endangered species isrecognized, it is also clear that adults and children living in communities of color areendangered species too. Environmental issues are immediate survival issues (2010:17).

The 1991 National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit constitutedsomething of a “dangerous” historical moment in late, industrial capitalism. Itcalled into question the lived consequences of degraded environments and thecollusion between planning, development and corporate interests in producingenvironmental inequity. The environmental justice narratives that emerged out ofthe Summit challenged assumptions about class, culture and ethics underpinningmainstream environmentalism and conservation. In other words, the stories toldat the National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit confronted thecultural imaginations of contamination and the making of shadow and sacrificedplaces. These narratives were also reflected in the 11 Principles of EnvironmentalJustice drafted in response to the testimony presented at the Summit. Thus, inaddition to narrating a very different set of environmental realities shaped byinequity, racism and invisibility; enacting testimonies of environmental injusticechanged the context for how “environment” is talked about and imagined.

The concept of storytelling that I am working with in this paper is one thatunderstands storytelling as a material practice, grounded in complex and co-constitutive realities (Blaser 2010). Storytelling is a way of representing the past,present and future simultaneously—therefore its practice is not linear. A key featureof storytelling is the communal transmission of experience (Stone-Mediatore 2003).This makes storytelling a performative way of practicising knowledge that constructsboth publicness and ontological difference. For example, Mario Blaser (2010:xv)uses the idea of “storytelling globalization” to talk about how globalization reflectsmultiple presents that are fought for and created by the knowledge practicesof Indigenous peoples, experts, NGOs, private interests and social movements.Stories are performed by different communities and become sites of struggle todefine and shape emergent global processes (2010:vix). Blaser argues that storiesreflect practices that produce “that of which they speak” (2010:xv). I am arguingthat environmental justice storytelling can be thought of similarly: as a way ofpractising knowledge in and of a damaged world and as a way of producing differentenvironmental realities.

Environmental Justice StorytellingEnvironmental justice storytelling produces narratives and practices that offerparticular insight into what it means to live in degraded and “shadowed”ecosystems. This gives rise to a broader set of environmental justice ethics andcultural politics that emerge from the everyday realities of living with environmentalcrisis. Literary scholar Frederick Buell writes that, “with the elaboration and growingperception that people inhabit an already damaged world, a more intimate relationbetween people and their biotic has become desirable, even as this has beenforced on people as a necessity” (2003:207). Buell’s observation highlights how


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pollution and geographical imaginations of place become entangled in strugglesfor environmental justice.

Environmental pollution is an active and enduring agent in degraded places thatforms “cultural logics” around contamination (Krupar 2011). Industrial pollutantspermeate bodies, places and senses—they are felt in the lingering presence ofchemical odours, dusts and particulates. Industrial pollutants, like other wastedmaterials, come to possess a life of their own—they mix with other things, endurein soils, genes and sediments and transcend all manner of boundaries that workto order and contain land uses, ecologies and social structures. Environmentaljustice storytelling is a way of making sense of the material affects of environmentaldegradation in a present that is currently unfolding. Stories do not just describesomething that has happened, but constellate together to become productive andworld making. Shari-Stone Mediatore (2003:43) argues that the productive role ofstories is what endows “fleeting phenomena with lasting form; thereby transformingphenomena that are experienced in a plurality of lives into publicly recognisedhistory”.

In the previous section, I argued that environmental justice storytellingmaterialized as publically recognized history at the First National People of ColorEnvironmental Leadership Summit. But there also exists a rich field of fiction,documentary film, art, photography and academic writing that captures thisbroader definition of environmental justice as an alternative form of public history.Environmental justice scholars have argued that environmental justice differs fromother types of environmental political activism because it is deeply rooted inculture, spirituality, work and everyday life (Adamson, Evans and Stein 2002;Alston 2010; Pulido 1998). This has given rise to scholarly, artistic and literarywork that documents the material, emotional and intimate insights into the livedconsequences of environmental injustice through creative practice. For example,Mike Davis (2002:32–65) in his essay “Dead west: ecocide in Marlboro country”draws on the work of photographers Richard Misrach and Carole Gallagher, whosephotographs witness the human and ecological toll of nuclear weapons testing inthe American West. Gallagher’s haunting portraits of the “Downwinders” (cancervictims of the US atmospheric testing program) and Misrach’s disturbing picturesof rusting Cold War detritus and dead animal carcasses near plutonium hotspots areexamples of environmental injustice storytelling that evoke powerful imagery of lifeand death in nuclear sacrifice zones in the American West (Davis 2002:35–46).

In a different vein, Joni Adamson (2001), T.V. Reed (2002) and Patricia Yeager(2003) explore environmental justice as a powerful fictional trope that has beenutilized by writers of colour, and in particular, American Indian authors such as LeslieMarmon Silko and Simon Ortiz. The environmental worlds depicted in novels suchas Silko’s Ceremony (1970) and Ortiz’s poems in Fight Back: for the Sake of the Peoplefor the Sake of the Land (1980) emphasize complex, reciprocal relationships betweenpeople and environments as well as the pressures exerted on these relationships byresource colonization (Adamson 2001:50). This work is part of an emergent tropeof environmental justice writing that links together ecological and spiritual themeswith the politics of pollution, racism and economic injustice (Sze 2002). Silko’s novelCeremony begins with this parable:



I will tell you something about stories,[he said]

They aren’t just entertainment.Don’t be fooled.

They are all we have, you see,All we have to fight off

illness and death.

You don’t have anything,if you don’t have the stories.

Their evil is mightyBut it can’t stand up to our stories.

So they try to destroy the storieslet the stories be confused or forgotten.

They would like thatThey would be happy

Because we would be defenseless then.

He rubbed his belly.I keep them here

[he said]Here, put your hand on it

See, it is moving.There is life herefor the people.

And in the belly of this storythe rituals and the ceremony

are still growing

Silko’s parable eloquently describes what it means to live in the “downstream ofhistory”—where lifeworlds are fragmented and marginalized by waste, hazardousland use and colonizing forces. Silko’s narrative structure is non-linear and it is atonce a form of witness to ongoing crisis and a place of alternative knowledge andpractice. Patricia Yaeger (2003:108–109) argues stories of environmental injustice infiction by writers of colour work with powerful themes that connect environmentalcontamination with social trauma and forgetting. Yaeger writes:

Descended from people who have been marginalized (defined as throwaways, treatedas trash), these writers of color grant trash in their fictions a surprising incandescence.In these texts trash trickles up as well as down; waste turns into a substance vital asblood whose very disorganization sponsors new questions: how do you reorganize apast that has been marginalized, buried, or bestowed by state formations not your own?(2003:109)

The performance of these stories in the world can have transformative effectsbecause they evoke different visions of environmental crisis and inequity as a placewhere people live. It is in this sense that environmental justice storytelling carries


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multiple meanings and realities “along together” (Griffiths 2007). The imaginativeelements of environmental justice activism make visible the connections betweendwelling and contamination. To rephrase Shari Stone-Mediatori, storytellingenvironmental justice brings into proximity a plurality of lives lived in placesdamaged by pollution and transforms this experience into collective and publicknowledge.

Environmental Justice Storytelling at Yucca MountainThe nearly three-decade long struggle against the siting of a large commercialhigh-level radioactive waste facility at Yucca Mountain reflects how environmentaljustice struggle is material and imaginative. While the nuclear waste repositoryhas not been built, the US Department of Energy and its contractors have spenta great deal of money (over US $10.5 billion) scientifically scrutinizing the site’shydrology and geology, undertaking cultural resource studies and environmentalimpact assessments, investing time and money in legal disputes, and initiatinglicensing procedures. This activity has also included the construction of a 5-mile“exploratory tunnel” underneath Yucca Mountain and the extraction of 75,000 ft ofcore and 18,000 geological and water samples (Ewing and McFarlane 2002:659).The years between 2001 and 2007 were a particularly active period as the DOE (withthe support of the Bush administration) pushed to obtain a license to construct thegeologic repository approximately 1000 feet below the desert floor and 1000 feetabove the present water table. This was despite numerous scientific and regularlysetbacks, including a ruling in the Federal Appeals Court that the YMP modelled itsdata on an arbitrary standard (that radioactive waste could safely be contained inYucca Mountain for a period of 10 000 years).

While the story of science and politics at Yucca Mountain is a compelling one, theearly-to mid 2000s were also a period when the YMP could afford to run a number ofhigh profile public relations campaigns that aimed to encourage public consent forthe project. Yucca Mountain Science Centres were constructed in Beatty, Pahrumpand Las Vegas and public tours of Yucca Mountain and the Nevada Test Site wereheld each spring and fall. These forums provided the context for public engagementwith high-level radioactive waste disposal. Within the exhibition space of the YuccaMountain Science centres, the DOE presented a scientific story that attemptedto naturalize the burial of highly radioactive nuclear waste. This was achieved bysituating nuclear development on an evolutionary scale of human technologicalachievement. Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute basketry and arrowheadswere presented alongside samples of rock and local wildlife, tunnel boring machines,examples of waste packages and posters of regulation standards for radiation doses(Kuletz 1998:267–269). The result was a linear story about scientific progress thatgave legitimacy and authority to the YMP project because it seamlessly placedthe radioactive dump on a continuum of development from prehistoric times toindustrial modernity.

The DOE’s public enactment of radioactive waste disposal reflects the hiddenviolence of the linear narration of history described by Walter Benjamin at thebeginning of this paper. Environmental justice activists at Yucca Mountain mobilized



Plate 1: Museum to end the atomic age. Photograph by the author, 2002

their activities to work “against the grain” of mainstream science, history andgovernance (Benjamin 1968:257). Storytelling alternatives to the spectre and realityof high-level nuclear waste disposal became an important way of intervening in theDOE’s public relations campaign. The full scope of imagination and interventionagainst nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain is beyond the scope of this paper.However, some of the creative practices enacted by different activists included:the local scientific monitoring of streams and groundwater; the development ofgrassroots environmental impact assessments and “peoples’ policies” on nuclearwaste; a public art competition to develop a warning sign for Yucca Mountainthat could communicate the dangers of radioactive waste for 10,000 years;creative fiction and non-fiction writing; civil disobedience and environmentaldirect action; documentary film; prayer circles, toxic tours and spirit walks and atravelling mobile museum that documented the atomic history of the region (seePlate 1). These mobile repertoires suggest that creative praxis in environmentaljustice struggles can bring together different forms of community memory, storiesand evidence in the same imaginative space. Thus, while diverse individuals andgroups produced different kinds of stories about Yucca Mountain, they mix togetherand become publicly knowable through performative telling and retelling. Suchpractices highlight what is important about the productive role of storytelling inenvironmental justice struggles, because it is through the constellation of stories(rather than the casual connections between them) that a plurality of presences andfeelings about real and perceived impacts of radioactive pollution is articulated.

In the following two scenarios of land justice and toxic touring, I argue thatenvironmental justice storytelling at Yucca Mountain provided public forumsthrough which alternative scenarios to nuclear waste disposal were made visible.In contrast to the big stories of science and human evolution told by the DOE,environmental justice activists engaged in a range of imaginative practices to gatherevidence and express the reasons for their objections.


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Western Shoshone Land JusticeIn late November 2004, I met Corbin Harney the spiritual leader of the WesternShoshone Nation near the western side of the Yucca Mountain ridge. Frigid windswere whipping down from the northwest over the basin and alkali flats with bonenumbing precision. Despite the freezing temperature, it was not difficult to seewhat is special about the sweeping views awash with the pastel hues of creosoteand sagebrush scrub. As we walked up a trail that led to a prayer circle, Corbinpointed out different plants and told me that many more varieties used to growthere. Behind the prayer circle, the wooden frame of a sweat lodge stood as anothervisible reminder of continued American Indian presence in the area. “We come uphere twice a year to warn the people, the public, that this is not a safe place to putnuclear rods,” Corbin said, “We come up here and try to warn the public and protestwhat they are doing to the land and to us. So much death caused by radiation”(interview, 29 November 2004).

Corbin, who died of cancer in 2007, spent much of his life witnessingenvironmental injury to his homeland by the military and the nuclear industry. Thearea around Yucca Mountain (which encompasses the Nevada National SecuritySite and the Nellis Airforce and Gunnery Range) is subject to an ongoing land claimby the Western Shoshone. The land has been closed to the public since the USgovernment began testing atomic weapons there in the early 1950s. In 1863, theWestern Shoshone signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley with the US government. Treatyof Ruby Valley lands encompass much of Nevada and extend north into Utah andsouth into California. In the terms of the treaty, the Western Shoshone grantedlimited land uses (such as travel and ranching) but never ceded any territory. TheUS government, however, argues that Aboriginal title has been extinguished by thegradual encroachment of non-Indian people in the region (Dorrow 2004).

Yucca Mountain is situated in a wounded landscape, physically marked bybarbed wire fences, armed security patrols, and decades of weapons testing andexperimentation that has left the land scarred and contaminated. But it is alsowounded landscape because the Western Shoshone and other effected tribes suchas the Southern Piaute and Owens Valley Paiute Indians have been denied access andjustice. Deborah Bird Rose (2004:34) writes that wounded space is “geographicalspace that has been torn and fractured by violence and exile, and that is pittedwith life that has been irretrievably killed”. Such places are often sites that arevulnerable to public amnesia and collective forgetting because they contain difficult,painful and unsettled pasts (Till 2008:108). Wounded spaces often remain sobecause present land use prevents decolonization and recuperation from takingplace (Rose 2004:34). This is particularly true for American Indian groups affectedby the spectre and reality of radioactive pollution at Yucca Mountain because it canirreparably damage cultural and spiritual connections to place (Stoffle and Arnold2003).

As Corbin walked around the campsite, he talked about Yucca Mountain andnuclear waste and about different plants and animals under threat from radiation.The Western Shoshone say that Yucca Mountain is “a snake that’s going north”because it is moving in a landscape that is interwoven with stories, ceremonies andpathways (Crum 1994; Kuletz 1998). Corbin explained:



[Yucca Mountain] it’s got holes all over it. Some of them holes got water in them andwhen the people used to roam the country going from north to south. In the wintertime they go south where it’s a warmer climate—they go through here and there’s strawon the other side. It stands about this high, and looks something like rye grass but it hasgot a hole going straight through it. You can stick one of them in the holes out hereyou can suck water out of it . . . that’s the reason why they came through here. It’s avery important thing because this is water that they can drink from. So that’s the reasonwhy our people always say, “Going through here you’ve got water to drink.” There usedto be a lot of different kinds of roots that you can dig up but the radiation kept killingthem. But it is something that was very important to the native people at one time. Justthink about ten thousand years ago. Going through here they had to rely on water androots and whatnot . . . And still today we survive off that but we don’t realise it. But we’redestroying everything that’s here. All the food put here by the nature—we are destroyingourself. We are destroying the mother, and so on and so forth (interview, 29 November2004).

Corbin’s story expresses a concept of land justice at Yucca Mountain. Land justiceencompasses cosmological, customary and kinship relationships with land. Thisis very different to expressions of land in Western law and politics that see it asproperty, resource or asset (Blomley 1994). Though writing in an Australian context,Jessica Weir (2009:7) provides a useful definition of land justice as “respect forpeople and country” and as an “expression of shared past, present and future withland”. This definition highlights the concerns and obligations of Aboriginal peoplesin environmental justice struggles where different ontological understandings ofland and place encompass spiritual and kinship relations between people andenvironment. This idea was also expressed by a Western Shoshone elder and long-time activist on land rights:

The land belongs to the people and generations of people who are yet to come . . . Wecan’t sell out. You don’t know who is going to be there. That’s how we think about it.The land belongs to the future and we can’t sell the future. We can’t sell life. Land is life.We can’t sell life (interview, 20 October 2004).

For Western Shoshone activists, environmental justice storytelling emphasizesholistic and intergenerational relationships between people and environment.Western Shoshone perspectives on Yucca Mountain reflect deeper historicalaffiliations with land that emphasize the connectivity between all things: food,culture, spirituality and kinship with plants, water, animals, rocks and sky.

Corbin’s story above describes the importance of having water to drink. AnotherWestern Shoshone elder I spoke with emphasized how radioactivity has haddevastating effects on traditional Western Shoshone ways of life:

Whereas before, you know, the environment of Yucca Mountain was—and other partsof Nevada which the Western Shoshone claim as their past, we are free to hunt the deerand smaller animals, you know as part of our diet. My parents were able to grow thingson the land or gather things on the land that were healthy and not contaminated. Butnow when you hunt on the land as you go closer to Yucca Mountain and the minesand the bombs that they have set off—there’s a question about contamination of food,especially the Western Shoshone food chain—are coming up through the grasses on theland that the animals eat, that we eat later (interview, 22 October 2004).


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Environmental justice storytelling, for Western Shoshone activists, connects landwith intergenerational and life-sustaining activities. Radioactive pollution has thepotential to disrupt these connections, by creating irreversible environmentalharm, which affects the most fundamental spiritual and material aspects ofWestern Shoshone lifeworlds (Stoffle and Arnold 2003). While nuclear testing andwaste dumping creates sacrificed places—American Indians remain connected toenvironmentally degraded land. This was a point repeatedly emphasized by severalWestern Shoshone elders, as something they felt was not well understood by non-Indian people. “We’ve been here for thousands of years,” an elder explained, “Andeven if you move to Ohio or Denver or wherever you move, the Western Shoshonewill still be here but what the United States will leave for us is polluted land”(interview, 22 October 2004).

Environmental justice storytelling, highlights affective rather than casualrelationships with environmental pollution and degradation. For the WesternShoshone, these relationships extend seven generations into the future, intoceremonial time, and are reflected in everyday practices that sustain kin and culturalidentities. Storytelling illuminates the distinct ontological presence of AmericanIndians at Yucca Mountain—which was also enacted in public protest forums.Western Shoshone activists, for example, organized several Spirit Runs in 2000,2001 and 2002, which involved a 240-mile walk or run around the perimeter ofthe Nevada National Security Site. The event was a visible affirmation of continuousWestern Shoshone presence on land affected by nuclear testing, experimentationand injustice. In 2002, a similar event called the Family Spirit Walk traversed 800miles from New Mexico to Nevada through American Indian lands affected byuranium mining, milling and weapons. Along the way, the family spirit walkers metwith American Indian people who shared their stories of living with the impacts ofradioactive development (Walters 2002).

Rebecca Solnit (2000) has observed that the area surrounding Yucca Mountainand the Nevada National Security Site is a place where stories about environmentaland social justice and US public history converge. “Such places,” she writes, “bringtogether histories which may seem unrelated—and when they come together itbecomes possible to see new connections in our personal and public histories andstories, collisions even. A spiderweb of stories spreads out from any place, but ittakes time to follow the strands” (2000:24). The spirit runs are an example ofthis because they are public enactments of contested history around land use andsocial justice in the American West. The public enactment of the spirit runs drewattention to the intersections between internal colonization, the cycle of nuclearproduction and the importance of land justice. But the ways in which constellationsof stories and practices gain traction and “publicness” is also important. The spiritruns connect with other Western Shoshone protest actions at Yucca Mountain—past and present—as well as other forms of community activism against high-levelradioactive waste disposal. Since the mid 1980s, hundreds of different communitygroups have protested in spring and fall gatherings at the Peace Camp locatedacross highway 95 from the Mercury Base on the Nevada National Security Site(Plate 2). The entanglement of these protests and actions with other scenarios of US



Plate 2: Prayer circle at the Peace Camp, Nevada. Photograph by the author, 2002

public history has shaped the stories and scenarios of anti nuclear waste activism atYucca Mountain.

The material work of storytelling illuminates how alternatives are inhabited,negotiated and worked out on the ground through activism. Storytelling practicesare not always affirmative, because they are reflective of emergent politics as well aspast conflicts. For example, in 1991 and 1992, the First National People of ColourEnvironmental Summit and the 500-year anniversary of Columbus’ landing in theAmericas transpired within 12 months of each other. Stories that emerged out ofboth events had a great deal of impact on how local environmental politics werebeing shaped by grassroots activists at Yucca Mountain. The 500-year anniversaryof Columbus sparked many public scenarios across the United States that celebratedperformances of discovery, and alternatively, many scenarios where suppressednarratives were creatively enacted through the recounting of American Indianhistories, genocide, forced relocation and internal colonialism (Taylor 2003:55–75). At Yucca Mountain and the Peace Camp, this sparked storytelling practicesthat linked histories of nuclear testing and dumping with colonialism and racism.The gathering momentum in the US public sphere around American Indian landrights and the impacts of environmental racism on communities of colour, openedup spaces for storytelling practices that created different possibilities for activismaround nuclear waste issues. It was during this time that American Indian leadershipwas asserted in community actions against Yucca Mountain (Plate 2). As one long-term environmental justice organizer at the Peace Camp explained:

Most people don’t remember that we [Indian and non-Indian people] used to haveno contact with each other at all. You know, there used to be very strictly Nativeorganizations and white activist organizations and no mixing whatsoever. And now wemay have a somewhat stilted and frustrated relationship but we do have a relationship.And the phrase, “nuclear colonialism”, which to me was such as wild idea trying to


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Plate 3: Hell’s Gate. Freeway underpass near Mercury, Nevada. Photograph by the author,2002

explain that people and now—well, even five years ago—you see it all the time (interview,15 July 2004).

Environmental justice storytelling represents the work of individuals and collectivesin performing and presenting community evidence—in the case of the WesternShoshone, this evidence is presented as the impacts of nuclear colonialism and thedenial of land justice. This also represents the processes through which disparateand fragmented experiences gain traction and power to become alternative publicknowledge where community and cultural memory can be mobilized and politicized(Peluzzo 2003:228). Alongside activities that provide testimonial accounts of livingwith toxics and pollution, creative actions also connect to deeper communitymemories and attachments to place. Sites such as the Peace Camp often representthe grounds upon which people act but they are focal points for the transmissionof stories. An archaeological presence of environmental justice storytelling can bediscerned at the Peace Camp—in the exposed wooden beams of sweat lodges, theremains of fire pits and prayer circles or the messages written on freeway underpassesand rocks (Beck, Drollinger and Schofield 2007; Plate 3). But the worlds that areshaped by the transmission of stories are actively worked at through engagementand praxis. In the last section of this paper, I discuss some of the ways in whichenvironmental justice activists engaged with mobile forms of storytelling to sustainpublic and political opposition to the waste dump.

Mobile Memory Work and Toxic TouringI met Corbin Harney on a “Peoples’ Tour” of Yucca Mountain guided by a long timeenvironmental justice activist and organizer. The Peoples’ Tour started as an informalexcursion (for the price of a tank of gas) for journalists, activists, school groups,



writers and the occasional graduate student as a way of getting people out into thedesert to learn directly about the impacts of Yucca Mountain from the perspectiveof local residents. Toxic tours are a mode of environmental justice storytelling thatconstructs alternative knowledge by bringing together diverse people from differentwalks of life. For example, Phaedra Pezzulo (2003) discusses how local toxic tours in“Cancer Alley” (a stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and BatonRouge) became a public forum for enacting environmental justice. Toxic tours area form of imaginative community praxis. For Peluzzo (2003:228) they provide aperformative space for asking and answering questions such as, “Whose evidence ispresent? Whose evidence is absent? Whose history has been forgotten? And whosememory should be told?”

The Peoples’ Tour at Yucca Mountain inverted and resisted public tours andopen days of the exploratory tunnel offered by the YMP. Organized through wordof mouth—the Peoples’ Tour offered up different visions of the region’s past andfuture through the ordinary narratives of people who live in the shadow of YuccaMountain. Toxic tours resituate the injuries and injustices of wounded and sacrificedplaces with the aim of transforming them into places of care, responsibility andconsideration. For Giovanna Di Chiro (2003:223) toxic tours perform an importantintervention in environmental politics—by inverting the idea of an “eco-tour”, tofocus on the politics and consequences of transformed and damaged environments.On the long stretches of highway that cut precise swaths through plains dotted withyuccas and playas, participants on the Peoples’ Tour are given a sense of the materialand intimate terrains of environmental injustice in the Yucca Mountain region. “Thepeople who are not used to the desert think it’s dead”, my guide commented on theway back to Las Vegas, “and if you take them out there and show them things thatthey’ve never seen before and will never see again—like feeling the stone, feelingthe silence—seeing a red tail hawk circle overhead and see the wild horses. I lovedoing that” (interview, 29 November 2004).

Like the Western Shoshone spirit runs and the environmental actions at thePeace Camp, the Peoples’ Tour traced a counter-history of Yucca Mountain thatresisted its representation as a sacrifice zone suitable for the burial of radioactivewaste. As a mobile, public forum, the Peoples’ Tour brought together a pluralityof stories and experiences that highlighted local experiences and concerns. Inaddition to meeting with Corbin Harney near Yucca Mountain and at his Poo-bah-hah Healing Centre across the border in Tecopa, California, we visited a templededicated to the Goddess Isis (located almost immediately across highway 95 fromthe Nellis bombing range), an organic dairy producer whose farm is located 11miles downstream from Yucca Mountain, and a local saloon owner in the ArmagosaValley. The Peoples’ Tour presented community evidence downplayed or outrightignored by the YMP, including stories about the contested science around the site’ssuitability, lack of public consultation, incorrect scientific monitoring, local historiesof cancers and sickness and the kinds of stands that people have made to defendtheir places and livelihoods.

As a form of imaginative praxis, toxic touring provided a visceral and everydaysense of what it means to live with environmental injustice. The Peoples’ Tour wasone of several strategies for mobile storytelling and community engagement with


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Plate 4: Mock nuclear waste cask. Peace Camp, Nevada. Photograph by the author, 2002

nuclear waste. Citizen Alert embarked on a similar project with its “Back to OurRoutes” tour in 2004. Activists constructed a 24 ft long mock nuclear waste cask,which visited 24 towns in Nevada over a 4-week period (see Plate 4). The “Backto Our Routes” tour served two purposes. The mock nuclear waste cask becamean exercise in “imagining the impossible” of high-level nuclear waste disposal atYucca Mountain by providing a dramatic visual image of what the transportation ofwaste casks would look like on local roads and rail. “Back to Our Routes” also madereference to the grassroots history of community organizing in Nevada. In 1975,when rumours of a nuclear waste dump first hit Nevada, two women decided toembark on a driving tour to ask people what they thought about it. “By the timethey had finished”, an organizer at Citizen Alert recounted, “350 people had joined”(interview, 23 November 2004).

ConclusionThe mobile and imaginative practices of Western Shoshone land justice and toxictourism illuminate how stories are performed in environmental justice strugglesto shape alternative imaginations of place. Environmental justice storytelling isan activity that does not just represent an “end”, though ends to environmentalinjustice are important. It is a practice that also reflects the processes throughwhich evidence about environmental impacts is gathered and how this alternativeknowledge is actively sustained. Storytelling as work-in-the-world therefore doesnot focus solely on causes and effects, but rather, weaves together a range ofissues and responses to environmental injustice—such as emotions, epidemiology,history, imagination and ontological difference. Because stories are full of resonance,memory and evidence, they reflect discernible and powerful truths about unwanted



land uses. At Yucca Mountain, this truth was simple but beared the weight ofcontinued community enactments: that it is not a good place to bury radioactivewaste.

There are two points about environmental justice storytelling that I want to makehere. The first comes from Rebecca Solnit and the reason why she says that anAngel of Alternate History presides over Yucca Mountain. “Most environmentalvictories”, Solnit points out, “look like nothing happened; the land wasn’t annexedby the army, the mine didn’t open, the road didn’t cut through, the factory didn’tspew effluents that didn’t give children asthma” (2004:74). We might add herethat the high-level nuclear waste dump has not been constructed. For Solnit,what lives on, and what becomes important to environmental justice struggleselsewhere, is the presence of stories that remind us that actions count. In otherwords, people are making decisions all the time about the kinds of worlds that theywant to live in and they are imaginatively and practically striving towards them.Stories about environmental justice can carry these diverse ideas along togetherto produce different environmental imaginaries (both good and bad) in and of adamaged world. The constellation of stories at Yucca Mountain recognized andreorganized connectivities between environmental pollution and everyday life inways that spoke to the heart of the matter for local residents. The power andresonance of this is important because it produces its own kinds of impactsthat travel beyond Yucca Mountain and the issue of high-level nuclear wastedisposal.

This brings me to my second point. Environmental justice storytelling is a practicethat can give insight into what it means to live with and transform environmentalcrisis. Storytelling and imaginative praxis as a method and as a process illuminateswhat people do in various places to combat environmental injustice. In this regard,it is a mobile repertoire that can travel to other places—through the experienceof individuals and activists and how this is remembered through photography,film, writing and art. At Yucca Mountain, the crisis of nuclear waste disposal mightpermanently be averted but the problem of what to do with nuclear waste sittingin storage in the nation’s 103 nuclear reactors remains. The Western Shoshonepeople can tick “nuclear waste dump” off their list of environmental concerns butthey continue to struggle for land justice and continue to be impacted by otherextractive industries such a gas drilling and gold mining. For those who live withthe realities of environmental justice most acutely, storytelling is a powerful way ofexploring these discernible truths—where shared capacities for suffering, as well asfor shaping and sustaining better worlds exist alongside each other.

AcknowledgementsResearch for this paper was undertaken as part of a PhD at the University of Southern Californiaand partially supported by two Haynes Foundation dissertation fellowships. Thank you toGregory Martin, Jenny Cameron, Wendy Steele, Richie Howitt, Sandie Suchet-Pearson andJim Tyner who have generously offered advice on various drafts. I would also like to thankPaul Chatterton and three reviewers for their thoughtful comments. The shortcomings aremy own.

In memory of Corbin Harney (24 March 1920–10 July 2007).


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Endnote1 The ‘Screw Nevada Bill’ is the popular name in Nevada for the 1987 amendments tothe Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Eighty percent of Nevadans were opposed to nuclear wastedumping at Yucca Mountain and felt that the decision to entomb waste there was politicalrather than scientific (Schraeder-Frechette 1993:24–25).

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Environmental Justice Storytelling: Angels and Isotopes at Yucca Mountain, Nevada

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